Long before your smartwatch could tell you how far you ran, who texted you, or that you need to leave right now to get to that important meeting, they told you the time. And the only reliable way to know the time in the dark (or during the day, when not looking at your clock or watch) was through sound. Watchmakers addressed this by creating watches that announced time via a series of sometimes complicated, often expensive, and always precise dings.Today, watches that chime are revered for both the mastery of craft and the sensation of using another sensory receptor to appreciate the art of watchmaking. If the dial is a canvas, then the movement is an orchestra. And while the cost of admission has traditionally been reserved for the wealthy, that is no longer entirely the case.“If you take a long view, chiming or striking was the baseline,” said Dr. Kristin Leith, Curator of the Clocktime Digital Museum. For a time, sound was the main way we told time. From Clocks to Wrists: The History of Audible TimekeepingSome of the earliest devices for measuring time, such as water clocks, weren’t concerned with visual precision so much as they were with marking the passage of time in a way people could perceive. Even from the beginning, sound came into play, when Archimedes made the first clock with gears in the 3rd century BC. It was a cuckoo clock.By the medieval period, the relationship between time and sound was well-established. Early mechanical clocks in Europe weren’t designed to be read; they were designed to be heard. “The first mechanical clocks didn’t have hands or any sort of visual representation of time passing,” Leith noted. “Instead, they sounded out the time. People didn’t tell time by looking at a clock; they heard time and ordered the rhythm of their day around the number of chimes.”